A short trip back to Cornwall

I spent a few days back in Cornwall last week, these are some sketches for around the south.

Sketches from the Lake District

I spent a week up in Grasmere, in the Lake District in Cumbria. I kept a sketch book of the week, here are a selection of some of the pages.

spaceships and grasshoppers

Over the past 6 months I've been working with a Falmouth based artist called Paul Chaney. Paul has been working on an installation for an arts centre in Donesk, Ukrane. He asked me to work on some visuals that would show a shuttle launching and docking into a space-station in real time. After playing around with different techniques we settled on using Maya and a vector renderer to create a look that resembled early computerised images.

the animation of the objects took a long time, we watched space launches and timed them, Paul did the maths and worked out globe rotations and travel times. Everything took longer than we planed but we did finally finish the project and below is an image of the film in the installation:

the film last aprox 20min, here are an early tests, i hope to upload the final film at some point.

Oxfam in-house blog post

I've just written a blog post for the Oxfam InHouse studios blog, pleas take a read. It talks about the process behind making my animated guide to land grabs.

http://oxfaminhouse.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/an-animated-guide-to-land-grabs/

Screenshots

Nearly there, 4 days to go! here are a selection of screenshots from the edit, they show an overall look of the film.

End shot

The final shot is made up of lots of frames all boarded up with charaters trapped on the outside, today i photoshoped together a selection of different frames to be put together in after effects.

Aftereffects

The last two weeks have been filled with editing all the shots together i have so far, Ive been working on one edit and updating it as i go. Ive learnt lots about aftereffect, and the film is coming together quite rapidly, still im left with 2 more shots to animate and colour and then just to add some finnishing touches.

Shot 11

Im slowly colouring in my film, shot by shot. Im working on shot 11 its taking about 3 days so far to colour this shot and there are 2 more characters to colour. Once this shot is complete it will be the majority of the film,so there are about 5 more shots to colour

 

 

Fall out of market

I've been colouring each shot using TVP. I've been trying to get a water colour texture to the characters. This shot shows all the market stall owners fall out the frame with the main characters running away. I've currently have 15 of 18 shots fully animated and all others started, and coloured 7 of 18. TVP is a really nice programme, its easy to animate in and creates really nice textures. After going to a demonstration on the software last week i'm looking into buying the software to work with after uni.

Cyclotropes at Flatpack Festival

Last weekend I went up to Birmingham for Flatpack festival where I ran a workshop on 'how to make a cyclotrope. We had lots of people come in throughout the day and draw there own animations and attach them to bike wheels.
We has a camera set up with a live feed which ment we could watch the animations live as the wheel spun round. here is a compilation of some of the films that were made.

Flatpack Cyclotropes from tim Wheatley on Vimeo.

SPACE STATION

Over the last few weeks ive been working on some maya models for a local artist who is making a film to be screened at an exhibition in the ukrane. He wants a lo-quality 80s style wire frame graphics mixed with google sketch up look modeled spaceships.

I made the following two tests in maya and used after effects to comp them together and add glow.

Lino Prints

this week I have been working on some new lino prints, the first one here of the woman with head in hands is for the last shot of my film. it is the close up which will  have a tear animated down her cheek. The bckground needs to be taken out , ill probably do this in photoshop. I also need to colour is using water colour. Below that is a reprint of my tree cut, done in a new yellow ink.

 

 

Shot_6 family leave house

this week I animated shot six, that involves the family coming out there home and looking happy. I did this shot in 1 afternoon. I need to add the background in and take it into TVP to colour it. the production stage is going well, only having a few problems with flash and switching files between cs.5 and cs.6.

Also this week i have been working with a local artist who has a residency in the Ukraine, He is working on a installation that focuses on space travel among other things. I am working with him to create some low-tech looking space graphics using Maya and aftereffects. here are some models i have made and some tests i did

market scene; full line animation

this week I finnished the line animation for the market scene.

Today I started colouring to test the characters in the backgorund, heres what its looking like, i think its looking great!

Colouring Market scene

Today and this week I have been finishing off the aimation for the Market scene. The line animation is now complete. I have been testing the colouring pipe line to see how it will work and how long it should take. I am going to colour it by exporting the lines from flash and bringing them into TVP, in TVP im painint chite behind the lines as a base and then adding watercolour paint ontop (this is all digital). The i export the colour and line from TVP and add the background in After effects. here is one frame at the different stages:

 

 

Stopmotion, attempt 2!

Today, me and Matt scouler re-shot the stopmotion/pixelation section of our film. After all the footage was corrupted last month when we had finnished animating we had to start all over again.

this time we know what we were doing but it still took a long time to get the the animating stage. We had similar computer promblems that wouldn't let us save images to the hard drive and a cameras that wouldnt be detected on the pc. After 4 hours off setting up we animated the sections very quickly and easily. It took us about 45min to and hour to animate the whole thing.
Its was a shame we lost the first attempt but it ment when we came to re shoot it we were more confident with the technique and have a really nice section of animation.

It still need a bit of tidying up and a few frames removed but here is our animated hand.

(video coming soon... processing on youtube)

Market Scene: earth quake

This week i am continuing to work of the market scene. I am animating the characters falling over in flash. Then I will take the tiffs into efter effects and shake the scene back and forth adding motion blur to create the earth quake effect. On the thursday I hope to reamnimate the stop motion sections of the film. I will then be able to move on to animating the next flash sections.

Market scene: characters

I have beeen working of the market scene today, It is the scene with the most characters at onces. I wanted each character to be on a animated loop. Its not finished yet, I want the market busyier and crowded.

Run cycle

This shot is for when my main character runs from the market back home. It has been animated in flash and then brought into tvp to be coloured. Im really please with the effect ifve got, it matched the wood cut look i wanted and will look great against my backgrounds.

Walk to market

This is the first finished section of animation, it is not yet colouer but it has been fully cleaned up.
It is a shot of the woman jumping out the frame and taking her crops of market.
Its been done in flash and have taken me about a week.

Land and Power: Pre Vis

Below is the pre vis. Its the current animatic with all the animation tests done to date cut in ontop. It gives a clearer idea of the style of the film. it also included a rough version of the music that is being composed by a musician at Oxfam for the film

New Linocuts for sale

http://www.etsy.com/shop/TimWheatley?ref=si_shop

I have a whole selection of new and old prints up for sale on my Etsy page. Each print is an individual piece of artwork, due to the printing technique no two prints are ever the same.

http://www.etsy.com/shop/TimWheatley?ref=si_shop

Land and Power Sketchbook

Land and Power Sketchbook, a set on Flickr.

This is my sketchbook that I have kept throughout the making of land and power. It includes alot of my design work mainly for the character. It shows the development of the project and has most my thoughts and ideas in.